The exponential growth of information available to users of various information networks (for example, broadcast, satellite, or cable television; wide area networks such as the World Wide Web or the Internet), requires organizing the presentation of the available information in an efficient and effective manner. Collaborative filtering attempts to organize presentation of information to a user in a wide area network (for example, the World Wide Web) based on automatically predicting the interests of a user by establishing relationships between items of interest to the user (for example, items recently viewed by the user at a commercial website) and other items that have been determined as of interest to other users. Item-based collaborative filtering, illustrated for example at the website “amazon.com” (users who bought x also bought y) is based on the premise that if a number of users purchase both items “x” and “y”, then another user viewing (or purchasing) the item “x” also may be interested in the item “y”.
Other examples of filtering content include human directed programming (for example, conventional network television programming), demographic based targeting that classifies individuals according to demographics, content based targeting (for example, Google AdSense available on the World Wide Web at the website address “google.com/adsense”), user defined filters (for example, a TiVo® WishList search on a commercially-available TiVo® Digital Video Recorder), popularity based targeting, domain-specific knowledge recommendation systems (for example, available at the website address “pandora.com”) and ratings-based filtering (for example, a ratings system provided by the online service “Netflix” at the website “netflix.com”).
Advertisers can implement an advertisement campaign for a targeted product or service based on distributing advertisement assets from the advertisement campaign (for example, text string, image banner, audio or video stream, etc.) to target audiences via various media markets. The advertisement campaign for the targeted product (referred to as an “ad buy”) is assigned a rule for supplying one of the advertisement assets of the advertisement campaign in response to an advertisement request relative to a target audience attribute: the target audience attribute can be implemented in various forms, depending on the medium used to convey the advertisement, for example keyword (for example, Google AdSense at the website address “www.google.com/adsense”), Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or a target demographic. Hence, a user browser accessing a web page can cause Javascript resource executed in the user browser to send a request to an advertisement server, causing the advertisement server to execute the rule for the advertisement campaign in order to supply to the Javascript resource an advertisement asset relative to the target audience attribute (for example, keyword in the web page, URL of the web page).
One example of targeted advertising involves use of psychographic analysis for market segmentation and advertising. Psychographic analysis involves establishing a psychographic profile of a defined class of consumers to predict subsequent behaviors by members of the defined class. The psychographic profile can include attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles of the defined class.